Discovered on TikTok and touring with Dear Evan Hansen - Eastbourne's Sonny Monaghan
Sonny Monaghan is loving the buzz of touring with Dear Evan Hansen after being discovered on TikTok.
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00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Really lovely
00:06to speak to Sonny Monaghan, who is, well, exciting times. You are touring in Evan Hansen,
00:12Dear Evan Hansen, which was the show that got you into musical theatre in the first place.
00:16In our area, you're playing Brighton and Southampton, and you had such a fabulous route
00:20into it through TikTok. What happened? Yeah, so they were looking for someone to put in the cast
00:28for this new touring production of the show, and so they put out a post on TikTok saying
00:33anyone who wanted to, if you were over the age of 18, could submit a video of themselves
00:37singing a song from the show, and then they would look through them and invite the people
00:41that they thought were most suited to in-person auditions in London. So I recorded myself
00:47singing Words Fail pretty much the day that they announced the search, got it up on TikTok.
00:54A couple of weeks later, I got an email that I had an in-person audition, and then a few weeks
00:58after that, after three rounds of auditions, I got offered the role of the alternate Evan Hansen,
01:02so I performed all the matinee performances. Sounds brilliant. And you were saying you chose
01:07that song because it's really challenging in terms of the character, isn't it? Yeah, I think
01:12it shows the depths that you have to go to emotionally as Evan Hansen, and I think I just
01:19wanted to show that I understood the journey that he goes on to get to that point. Yeah,
01:26that sounds fantastic, and the point is you put in an awful lot of hard work to get there, but as
01:30you're saying, if you put the hard work in, you get the opportunities, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I think
01:36that's what I've learned over having finished college and deciding that I was
01:40going to go straight into, like, just grafting away being an actor, I think was that everything I've
01:47like achieved in the past couple years has all been off the back of me being actively going
01:55out there and looking for opportunity and making sure that I was putting myself in the places I
02:00needed to be to do what I wanted to do. Fantastic, and this is a brilliant reward, isn't it? And I
02:05haven't seen the show yet, really looking forward to seeing it. What makes it such a special show?
02:09Why do people accept it and love it? Yeah, people adore it, and I think it's because of the
02:17relatability and the real people that you see on stage. You're not seeing a caricature of grief or
02:24a caricature of anxiety. You're seeing quite a real portrayal of it, and I think you find
02:32that everyone can find someone or the character in the show to connect to, and then obviously
02:36the overarching, like, the big song in the show, You'll Be Found, I think drives such an emotional,
02:43hopeful message to a lot of people. Well, congratulations on getting the role.
02:48Lovely to speak to you. Thank you very much. Best for the future. Thank you. All the best for you too.